That day she walked from window to window in his room, then back into her own. She stood behind the thin curtain and looked down over Bull Street. The rain was lessening; people were driving past as though it were a normal day. A Negro man came by, leading a goat and cart. The man was lame, and walked slowly, one ankle twisting with each step. He held the goat by the halter. The goat’s ears flopped. She watched until he was out of sight. It was remarkable: the man acted as though nothing had happened, as if the earth had not suddenly quit its revolutions, as if Frank were still alive.
That night they had brought him back and laid him on the dining room table. The doctors had been at him. He was swathed in a sheet to his neck, but his head was untouched. They left her alone with him. His face was gray, and she could not bear to look at him. She could not look away. Inside one nostril was a smear of dark blood. He had bled from the nose and the mouth, and the skin was stained. She thought of the blood moving through his body, the exquisite network of arteries and veins, the subtle pulsing movement from heart to lungs to fingertips. He had bled from within. She could not bring herself to touch the intimate cavity, his nostril. His body had been breached from within.
She thought of McDow firing the single shot. She imagined him raising the pistol, taking aim. He’d shot Frank from the side and back. Not from the front. He had shot Frank when he had turned, when he was opening the door to leave.
She couldn’t bear to think of Frank putting his hand to his side, saying the words “You have killed me.” She closed her eyes when she thought of those words.
* * *
THAT NIGHT SHE had sent the children to the Lafittes’. She hadn’t told them what had happened. In the morning she went to fetch them. She held their hands as they walked back home, just around the corner. She took them upstairs past the niches in the stairwell. In her room she sat down on her bed and held out her arms. Frightened, they sat down on either side of her.
“Mes pauvres chéris, vos père est mort,” she said. My poor darlings, your father is dead. She couldn’t bring herself to say it in English. They looked up at her, their faces strange with shock. They didn’t believe her. But it was true, and she said it again. It seemed terrible that she should have to insist. Warrington looked down and clapped his legs together tightly and crossed them at the ankle. Ethel stared up at Sarah.
“Il est parti?” she said. He’s gone? “I never said goodbye. I never said I was sorry.”
Then they all cried, huddled together on the bed, the mourning doves trilling quietly in the branches outside. Sarah rubbed Ethel’s back, her fingers getting tangled in the long hair. The two things seemed joined, incomprehensible: the tangled fingers, his death.
* * *
DURING THE TRIAL Hemphill came to see her at the end of every day, to tell her what had happened in court. They sat in the parlor with a tea tray. Hemphill passed his handkerchief over his forehead. He was a burly, kindly man. She could see that it was distressing him.
“How was it today?” she asked.
“They deposed one of the jurors,” he said. “They asked if he’d told an official of the court that if McDow chose him for the jury, ‘It would be all right for McDow.’”
“So bald,” she said. “What did he say?”
“He more or less admitted it,” Hemphill said.
She knew they’d all read Frank’s last editorial. But she expected them to remember his long record of support. She expected them to find Thomas McDow guilty of murdering her husband.
They did not.
* * *
AFTERWARD SARAH AND HÉLÈNE were the only grown-ups in the household. Hélène was mournful, and wept while she sat sewing in the window. She wrote a long poem about the captain, which she gave to Sarah: we will never see his like again, she grieved. She confessed about meeting McDow; she wept and begged forgiveness. Sarah forgave her: Hélène was young, and without a mother, and far from home. To silence the gossip she had a doctor examine Hélène to be sure that she was still intacta. Which he said she was.
Hélène pitied Madame, who was now a figure of failure and loss, a widow. She had lost her patron. The captain had had the power, the stature. Now Madame had become powerless and old. Hélène felt, privately, that they were now equals; Madame had been brought low. She, Hélène, still had a future; Madame had none. She offered solace to Madame; that was her obligation now. She recited sayings to make her feel better: En tout pays, il y a une lieue de mauvais chemin; in every countryside, there’s a bad road. It was comforting to know this happened to everyone.
Sarah pitied Hélène, the center of such a public scandal. That summer she took Hélène and the children up into the mountains. They changed trains in Columbia, and as they walked across the platform Sarah heard a woman whisper. People were looking at them. Someone said, “The French maid!” People gathered, avid. Sarah took Hélène’s arm and looked straight ahead as they walked into the ladies’ waiting room. “Ignore them,” Sarah said.
Sarah made a scrapbook of the trial for Hélène. She pitied Hélène and was grateful for her company, but they were not friends. They were companions of a sort, nothing more. Each time Hélène recited a proverb Sarah thought of the intimacy she’d lost, with someone with whom she’d seemed to share a mind. Now she was reduced to a deadly dailiness with someone who spouted clichés. They were yoked together by the dreadful burden of the death, but they were not a pair.
“Après la pluie, le beau temps,” Hélène reminded her. After the rain comes good weather.
Yes, Sarah said.
One afternoon they were in Sarah’s room. They were brushing her clothes against moths before putting them away for the summer. Sarah held up a blue georgette dress by the shoulders; Hélène crouched before her, wielding the stiff-bristled brush. She held the skirt wide with one hand.
“Brush hard, Hélène,” Sarah said. “Along the seams. Make sure to get the eggs.”
“The eggs,” Hélène repeated.
“Small and white,” Sarah said. “They look like specks. Inside them are the moth larvae. Little worms. They eat their way out through the clothes.”
“Yes,” said Hélène. She didn’t believe any of this. Eggs, worms. It wasn’t likely. “It’s a beautiful dress, Madame. You don’t wear it.” Madame hadn’t worn colors since the funeral. She thought of wearing it herself. It would suit her. She wondered if Sarah would think of giving it to her.
Sarah shook her head. She couldn’t imagine wearing blue. Her heart had become dark.
“Time heals,” Hélène offered, brushing hard.
Sarah’s arms were tiring, holding up the dress. She felt she was waiting for something, something was gathering around her, some great breath was being held, but what was it? Frank was not coming back. But she was waiting for something: for her life to start again.
“And in the end,” Hélène said, under her breath, “the ocean will wash away the guilt.” She turned up the hem, scrubbing along the edge.
Sarah looked at her. “Wash away the guilt?”
Hélène looked up. She was kneeling now, leaning back on her heels.
“Whose guilt will be washed away?” asked Sarah. “The doctor’s?” She wouldn’t speak his name. “Are you saying his guilt will be washed away? It will never be washed away. What are you talking about, Hélène?”
But Hélène plucked at the stiff bristles of the brush and said nothing.
“Whose guilt?” Sarah asked again.
Hélène shook her head and looked down at the dress. “It was a manner of speaking,” she said. She began brushing, hard.
Sarah looked down at her, frowning. Whose guilt?
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON in the following spring, Sarah was in her room, reading an article in The Century. She heard Warrington’s voice rise, suddenly high and outraged. She went on reading, waiting for it to lower. Now another voice was raised: Hélène answered him angrily. Hélène had no dignity. She quarreled with them as though she were a third
child of the house. Sarah put down the magazine and went into his room.
They were grappling in front of his little fireplace. Hélène held Warrington by the wrists, he was pushing at her.
“Laisses-moi!” he cried, furious. Let me go!
“Non,” she said, in a sort of hiss.
“What’s going on?”
Warrington turned, red-faced. “She took my diary! She threw it in the fire!”
In the grate something was burning, white pages curling and blackening, smoke rising dark and twisting.
“Is that his diary?” Sarah asked Hélène.
Hélène thrust Warrington’s wrists away and he staggered backward. “He wrote that I was the French maid,” she said. “It’s insupportable. I am not French and I am not a maid.”
Sarah leaped to the fireplace. She took the iron tongs, lifted the little blaze, and dropped it on the hearth: a small notebook with a caramel-colored cover. The cover was charred, the pages lifting. Smoke rose from it in a dark twisting skein.
“How dare you take his diary,” Sarah said. “How dare you destroy his property.”
“It’s only a child’s book,” Hélène said. “I saw what he wrote. He may not call me that.”
“It’s what they call her,” Warrington said, his voice high and quavering.
“It’s wrong,” hissed Hélène. “It’s wrong. You may not say it.”
“And you may not take his belongings,” Sarah said, furious. “That is his book. That is his writing. You have destroyed it.”
Hélène lifted her chin.
“Do you understand me, Hélène?” Sarah said, raising her voice. “What you’ve done is very serious.”
Maybe she’d fire her right now, this minute. Rage had been building in her for a year, rising like black smoke in a chimney. She would not put up with this.
“And he has done something very serious,” Hélène said. She shifted her shoulders, almost shrugging, rude as a terrier.
“Don’t speak to me like that, Hélène,” Sarah said. Now she had lowered her voice. “Remember your place.”
“I know my place, Madame,” Hélène said. She felt something boiling up inside her. She thought of Joan. “I have always known my place in this house. I know who I am, and who you are.” She could feel her true self appearing. “I knew the captain would be murdered that day. The doctor told me and I was glad. The captain was interfering with my life. He could not tell me how to behave.” She set her hand on her hip. “The doctor told me what he was going to do.” She held her head high. Like Joan she would never yield.
There was a long silence. Hélène’s insolence, her vast overweening vanity, her stupidity, her ignorant malice, her recklessness and disloyalty rose and swelled, like hot choking air, filling the house, every space in it.
“Faites vos malles,” Sarah said. Pack your bags. Heat rose into her throat, her cheeks. She was stiff with rage; she was incandescent. “I’ll take you to the train in the morning.”
They stared at each other.
Hélène stepped backward. Her face turned sober. She gave a half curtsy.
“Go to your room. I don’t wish to see you anymore tonight,” Sarah said.
Hélène gave another little bob. “The train? To?”
Sarah said nothing.
“The train to where, Madame?”
“To New York. My sister, Madame DuPres, will put you on the boat to France.”
Hélène stood frozen. Her eyes were set fast on Sarah. She put her hands together at her breast.
“And will you give me a letter?” she asked.
Sarah said nothing.
“A letter of recommendation?” Hélène asked, timid.
Sarah said nothing, her pale eyes on Hélène.
“Without a letter, I have no future, Madame,” she said. “No agency will take me.”
Sarah looked at her levelly. “A letter of recommendation,” she repeated. “As what?”
“Mama,” Warrington said. He held the tongs, gripping the charred diary. “Some of it is all right.” Though it was not; the blackened leaves broke off, charred and brittle, and drifted to the hearth.
* * *
SARAH LIVED FOR the next ten years beside her husband’s murderer. Before that day Sarah had never seen him on the street; afterward she saw him often, his sloping shoulders, his awkward stride. Sarah always wore black, and when she saw him she stopped and raised her arm to point at him. She stood in silence, swiveling slowly to hold her aim as he moved past, like a compass set at Guilt. She pointed until he was out of sight.
Ten years. In 1898 Ethel married a lawyer and moved to New York; Sarah gave her the mahogany dining table as a wedding present. She rented the house on Bull Street and she and Warrington moved to France. Versailles, not Provence: she never lived in the stone house with blue shutters. It was a relief to be gone from Charleston, surrounded by the language of her childhood, on streets where she had never seen Frank.
In 1904 McDow committed suicide. He was living alone by then; his wife had left him for good. His body wasn’t found for several days. Beside his bed was a glass of water containing traces of chloral hydrate.
On May 5, 1909, Sarah was in the apartment she shared with her son. Warrington was in Africa. He was now a journalist, and on assignment, covering President Roosevelt’s safari. So he had become an explorer after all. Sarah was proud of him. She hoped he’d marry well, as Marie had foretold. She waited for his letters, long and newsy, one each week.
Sarah had been feeling poorly, and then a cough had come on. She’d felt weakened by it and had taken to her bed. The doctor had come: pneumonia had settled in her lungs. That day a nurse sat near her, knitting, and the room was quiet except for Sarah’s slow, difficult breaths. She lay against the pillow, drifting in and out of sleep. She was waiting for her son to return. She could feel him somewhere, distant, but quick and alive. She closed her eyes. Her chest felt small and compressed, diminished. She took the linen sheet between her fingers, plucking. When she opened her eyes she saw the dark armoire across the room, and the tall windows with white curtains shifting in the breeze. She thought of the rainy morning in Baton Rouge. The pattering sound on the leaves, and the tall curtains belling slowly out, then collapsing. She could feel the cool damp wind, like sadness.
* * *
SLAVERY IS AMERICA’S fell forefather, violence and racism its ghastly offspring. Slavery makes the body a tablet on which to write the messages of pain and death. Violence allows the human heart to express its darkest impulses; racism allows the human heart to close against itself.
* * *
IT’S NEARLY a thousand years since the Morgans moved to the Welsh mountains, to avoid enslavement by the foreign king. It no longer seems remarkable. Now it seems like what anyone would do, if only they could.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Note: All texts in nonstandard fonts are direct quotes from the sources listed, including original errors in grammar, spelling, and so forth.
Some passages in standard font draw heavily from named sources—in particular, the various accounts of the Hamburg massacre, recorded in congressional testimony, and those of McDow’s trial, which were published in various newspapers.
As a novelist I have imagined thoughts and dialogue. But as a biographer I have hewed to what is known and documented, and have knowingly changed no facts. The most preposterous things in this narrative are true.
BOOKS
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Budiansky, Stephen. The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War. New York: Plume, 2009.
Butterfield, Fox. All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence. New York: Vintage, 2008.
Clark, E. Culpepper. Francis Warrington Dawson and the Politics of Restoration: South Carolina, 1874–1889. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980.
; Collins, Varnum Lansing. “Prospect near Princeton.” Princeton University Bulletin 15, no. 3 (June 1904), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101074935030.
Dawson, Francis Warrington. Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865. Edited by Bell I. Wiley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Dawson, Francis Warrington, Jr. Le nègre aux États-Unis. Paris: Librairie Orientale & Américaine, 1912.
Dawson, Francis Warrington, Jr. Buz and Fury. Chicago: Honest Truth Publishing, 1923.
Dawson, Sarah Morgan. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. Edited by Charles East. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
Dawson, Sarah Morgan. A Confederate Girl’s Diary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.
Dew, Charles B. The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
McKinley, Carlyle. An Appeal to Pharaoh: The Negro Problem, and Its Radical Solution. New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1889.
The Miscellaneous Documents of the Senate of the United States for the Second Session of the Forty-Fourth Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877.
Morgan, James Morris. Recollections of a Rebel Reefer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917.
Poston, Jonathan H. The Buildings of Charleston: A Guide to the City. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Roberts, Giselle. The Correspondence of Sarah Morgan and Francis Warrington Dawson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
Sass, Herbert Ravenel. Outspoken: 150 Years of The News and Courier. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953.
Savelle, Max. George Morgan, Colony Builder. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Reprinted 1967.
Townsend, Belton O’Neall. When South Carolina Was an Armed Camp. Edited by John Hammond Moore. Charleston, SC: Home House Press, 2013.
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